Vedic Fashion Comes With A Health Warning

As I strolled the lawns of a college through the lines of white tents standing on a budget destroyed by a student leader, my gaze was fixed straight through the movement of flesh and bone on nothing but the food stalls. Cuisines which I could not recognize let alone pronounce lay waiting for my tongue. The only problem was that in this fest, like most fests I had been to as a student, I didn’t have any money.

Planning with, for and against hunger, I found myself climbing a small hill that led to a stage which shot the latest techno tracks in hemispherical concussions towards the crimson skies. All I could imagine was a paper plate in my hand overloaded with samples from each of those food-stalls with oil glistening in the bright lamps that lit up this dream of mine. Sadly, the only thing that glistened right now was my salivating tongue.

The music reverberated from the buildings that towered around the stage and as I tried to make sense of it through the bass I ran into a man in a grey suit. He was speaking in a heavily accented English with two of his friends who seemed more like his bodyguards. His beard was cut short, he had a piercing in his left ear and had covered up his sunburnt skin with a lot of makeup – he obviously seemed important. As he tried to avoid me standing there and gazing at him, I instantly recognized the man. It was Baba Ramdev. The man himself. The man who bent himself through the masses to climb and sit atop a pharmaceutical empire that is giving international consumer product brands a run for their money. The same sodium laurylsulphate that Unilever sells gets a special Vedic property when sold under his name. He was the Yoga Prophet of Profit. Now his gaze and the quarter of its flicker caught this fool looking at him again.

I decided to not creep him out any more and started a simple conversation with him from which I learnt that he had been invited by this college to judge their fashion show- the main event of the night! I was heavily confused at this point as nothing was making sense and really felt like recording all of it because this was unbelievable. The conversation ended as quickly as it had started and a crowd began to assemble around us. I realized that the stalls would close soon and made a dash towards them to get a plate full of that unhealthy filth. The music started again, louder than before as the first model stepped on the ramp to the beats of an artist who was really famous in a chamber in my head. I looked ahead as I ran down the slope to see the tents drift further away with my ever increasing speed. I think I had been cured.